If it were still possible to isolate the material and immaterial spaces of life, we could continue to think of toxicity in terms of externality: an outside that harms bodies beyond the function of the sensorium.
The senses are the site where the body engages with the ground, with others, with warmth, and fear. A space of contact that is fundamental for the maintenance and care of life. In the process, these sensory contours are shaped, bent, infiltrated; permeating the thresholds of a harmful understanding, contaminated thoughts, and poisoned senses, toxic ecosystems, and corrupted social environments that merge and reinforce each other. They produce as much as they are produced; the layers connecting these contours are both inside and outside, in the sensory and the material, on the edge and in the overflow.
Although the boundaries between body and air have historically been conceived as stable elements, rather than as membranes circulating oxygen and carbon dioxide from “inside” to “outside” and vice versa, their modes of action are mutable: from psychic and bodily interiority to the toxic order of racial industrial patriarchy. Toxicity is a spiral engine, an arrow turned into a circle.
Through works that approach these cycles, this exhibition unfolds forms of reciprocity that emphasize how toxicity infiltrates introspection, change, and the resilience of life until it cannot be detached from it. These works point towards the complexity inherent in this mutual permeability in terms of representation. The toxicity as ontology can only be traced through the traces it leaves, the effects and modifications it causes, the behaviors it employs, and the bodies upon which it acts. And none of this is stable. Here, the artists have relinquished the principle of the self in favor of forms of malleability or channeling in which their artistic means are no longer given but conceived as variables: fields of force where art materials become flows of matter and signs that reassemble and transform. The resulting works amount to an aesthetic practice that is dynamic and dialectical, revolving around slips in form, vocabulary, and means.
The poem that opens this text, and with it the exhibition, accounts for a form of poetry in which Bhanu Kapil resonates with materials and words, allowing language to pierce the idea of the body as something complete. Her poems expose subjectivity to a contact with the world that causes it to adhere to its surfaces and environments. Saturated with both past and present contact, much like your lungs remember what you’ve breathed until today, the contamination of the non-self over the self, the possibility of becoming and transforming, they reveal an omnipresent toxicity that crisis our idea of the subject, and therefore the adequacy of how to represent it.
This difficulty also arises in the eclecticism of Georgina Hill’s series of boxes. In them, the artist recovers the fascination for a mysterious, uncontrollable, and hidden world where the body becomes aware, learns, and assimilates through fascination and contact. After what Max Weber called the “disenchantment of the world” (the Western thought’s desire for absolute rationalization that explains the entirety of the universe and strips it of its agency to function in the service of rationalistic progress), an internal void is produced. As Yayo Herrero says: “Knowledge broke at a stroke the knots that bound it to life and became lost.” And it is precisely those knots, the elements most attached to life, that Hill uses as a counterweight to a toxic system sustained by the forces of progress and growth. A kind of refuge where the body dissolves in contact with dried leaves, newspaper, fake nails, or the warm light of an interior.
The gaze infiltrates these boxes slowly, allowing subjectivity to adhere to those internal surfaces. An interiority that becomes abject in the gallery space through a series of sculptures in which Giulia Cenci uses the haptic to return our bodies to the complex cycle of physiological and sensory toxicity to which they belong. It is as if in them, what María Zambrano called poetic reason is given: the visceral need to overcome isolated, abstract, and instrumental perception: to distribute the logos through the entrails.
Looking closely at these ‘entrails,’ one can sense how Cenci’s work implies a transformation towards something that exceeds the human. Subjectivity approaches the synthetic and empathizes with a conception of the machine as something that must be articulated in complementary rather than antagonistic terms to the human. What is toxic when you don’t know who or what the experimenting subject is?
This crumbling of the self is felt in the diaphragm through the low notes of kɐ’ʀxɛgʁɐ, a sound installation by Jonás de Murias that makes the air in the gallery denser. In that density, our skin receives and reflects the sound. It is, in the words of Bhanu Kapil, both host and guest at the same time, making us experience the permeability of the body. And if, even in this dense air, you believe that the body you call yours belongs to you, as if the distinction between body and mind or between ‘I’ and the world could be maintained, imagine your corporeality floating in the void.
Alejandro Alonso Díaz
Poem
The host-guest chemistry
Is inclusive, complex, molecular,
Delicate.
Google it.
Is it the host who wraps
The guest or is it the guest
Who draws faint shapes
Of love, like the love
Of a father to a child
In September
And January, when the child
Is more
Vulnerable?
Are these questions enough
To violate
Your desire for art
That comes from another
Place?
What are the limits
Of this welcome?
After all, I feel nothing.
For you.
Bhani Kapil
